Percival Ford wondered why he had come. He did not dance. He did not care much for army people. Yet he knew them all--gliding and revolving there on the broad lanai of the Seaside, the officers in
their fresh-starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and
black, and the women bare of shoulders and arms. After two years in
Honolulu the Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska,
and Percival Ford, as one of the big men of the Islands, could not
help knowing the officers and their women.

But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf. The army women
frightened him just a little. They were in ways quite different
from the women he liked best--the elderly women, the spinsters and
the bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages
whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who
came meekly to him for contributions and advice. He ruled those
women by virtue of his superior mentality, his great wealth, and the
high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii. And he
was not afraid of them in the least. Sex, with them, was not
obtrusive. Yes, that was it. There was in them something else, or
more, than the assertive grossness of life. He was fastidious; he
acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare
shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their
vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.

Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly,
drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and
asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than
their women. He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army
men. They seemed uncomfortable, too. And he felt, always, that
they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or
tolerating him. Then, too, they seemed, by mere contiguity, to
emphasize a lack in him, to call attention to that in them which he
did not possess and which he thanked God he did not possess. Faugh!
They were like their women!

In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman's man than he was a man's
man. A glance at him told the reason. He had a good constitution,
never was on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders;
but he lacked vitality. His was a negative organism. No blood with
a ferment in it could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow
face, those thin lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes. The
thatch of hair, dust-coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the
niggard soil, as did the nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just
hinting the suggestion of a beak. His meagre blood had denied him
much of life, and permitted him to be an extremist in one thing
only, which thing was righteousness. Over right conduct he pondered
and agonized, and that he should do right was as necessary to his
nature as loving and being loved were necessary to commoner clay.

He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the lanai and the
beach. His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head
away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the
Southern Cross burning low on the horizon. He was irritated by the
bare shoulders and arms of the women. If he had a daughter he would
never permit it, never. But his hypothesis was the sheerest
abstraction. The thought process had been accompanied by no inner
vision of that daughter. He did not see a daughter with arms and
shoulders. Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency of
marriage. He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal
experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as
bestial. Anybody could marry. The Japanese and Chinese coolies,
toiling on the sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married.
They invariably married at the first opportunity. It was because
they were so low in the scale of life. There was nothing else for
them to do. They were like the army men and women. But for him
there were other and higher things. He was different from them--
from all of them. He was proud of how he happened to be. He had
come of no petty love-match. He had come of lofty conception of
duty and of devotion to a cause. His father had not married for
love. Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac Ford. When
he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of life,
he had had no thought and no desire for marriage. In this they were
alike, his father and he. But the Board of Missions was economical.
With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that
married missionaries were less expensive per capita and more
efficacious. So the Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.
Furthermore, it furnished him with a wife, another zealous soul with
no thought of marriage, intent only on doing the Lord's work among
the heathen. They saw each other for the first time in Boston. The
Board brought them together, arranged everything, and by the end of
the week they were married and started on the long voyage around the
Horn.

Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union. He had
been born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat.
And he was proud of his father. It was a passion with him. The
erect, austere figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his
pride. On his desk was a miniature of that soldier of the Lord. In
his bedroom hung the portrait of Isaac Ford, painted at the time
when he had served under the Monarchy as prime minister. Not that
Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly wealth, but that, as prime
minister, and, later, as banker, he had been of greater service to
the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the English crowd, and
all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at Isaac Ford as a
commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different. When the
natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac
Ford who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and
taken possession of fat, vast holdings. Small wonder the trading
crowd did not like his memory. But he had never looked upon his
enormous wealth as his own. He had considered himself God's
steward. Out of the revenues he had built schools, and hospitals,
and churches. Nor was it his fault that sugar, after the slump, had
paid forty per cent; that the bank he founded had prospered into a
railroad; and that, among other things, fifty thousand acres of Oahu
pasture land, which he had bought for a dollar an acre, grew eight
tons of sugar to the acre every eighteen months. No, in all truth,
Isaac Ford was an heroic figure, fit, so Percival Ford thought
privately, to stand beside the statue of Kamehameha I. in front of
the Judiciary Building. Isaac Ford was gone, but he, his son,
carried on the good work at least as inflexibly if not as
masterfully.

He turned his eyes back to the lanai. What was the difference, he
asked himself, between the shameless, grass-girdled hula dances and
the decollete dances of the women of his own race? Was there an
essential difference? or was it a matter of degree?

As he pondered the problem a hand rested on his shoulder.

"Hello, Ford, what are you doing here? Isn't this a bit festive?"

"I try to be lenient, Dr. Kennedy, even as I look on," Percival Ford
answered gravely. "Won't you sit down?"

Scotch and soda was Kennedy's order; then, turning to the other, he
said:-

"Of course, I don't ask you."

"But I will take something," Ford said firmly. The doctor's eyes
showed surprise, and the servant waited. "Boy, a lemonade, please."

The doctor laughed at it heartily, as a joke on himself, and glanced
at the musicians under the hau tree.

"Why, it's the Aloha Orchestra," he said. "I thought they were with
the Hawaiian Hotel on Tuesday nights. Some rumpus, I guess."

His eyes paused for a moment, and dwelt upon the one who was playing
a guitar and singing a Hawaiian song to the accompaniment of all the
instruments.

His face became grave as he looked at the singer, and it was still
grave as he turned it to his companion.

"Look here, Ford, isn't it time you let up on Joe Garland? I
understand you are in opposition to the Promotion Committee's
sending him to the States on this surf-board proposition, and I've
been wanting to speak to you about it. I should have thought you'd
be glad to get him out of the country. It would be a good way to
end your persecution of him."

"Persecution?" Percival Ford's eyebrows lifted interrogatively.

"Call it by any name you please," Kennedy went on. "You've hounded
that poor devil for years. It's not his fault. Even you will admit
that."

"Not his fault?" Percival Ford's thin lips drew tightly together
for the moment. "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle. He has always
been a wastrel, a profligate."

"But that's no reason you should keep on after him the way you do.
I've watched you from the beginning. The first thing you did when
you returned from college and found him working on the plantation as
outside luna was to fire him--you with your millions, and he with
his sixty dollars a month."

"Not the first thing," Percival Ford said judicially, in a tone he
was accustomed to use in committee meetings. "I gave him his
warning. The superintendent said he was a capable luna. I had no
objection to him on that ground. It was what he did outside working
hours. He undid my work faster than I could build it up. Of what
use were the Sunday schools, the night schools, and the sewing
classes, when in the evenings there was Joe Garland with his
infernal and eternal tum-tumming of guitar and ukulele, his strong
drink, and his hula dancing? After I warned him, I came upon him--I
shall never forget it--came upon him, down at the cabins. It was
evening. I could hear the hula songs before I saw the scene. And
when I did see it, there were the girls, shameless in the moonlight
and dancing--the girls upon whom I had worked to teach clean living
and right conduct. And there were three girls there, I remember,
just graduated from the mission school. Of course I discharged Joe
Garland. I know it was the same at Hilo. People said I went out of
my way when I persuaded Mason and Fitch to discharge him. But it
was the missionaries who requested me to do so. He was undoing
their work by his reprehensible example."

"Afterwards, when he got on the railroad, your railroad, he was
discharged without cause," Kennedy challenged.

"Not so," was the quick answer. "I had him into my private office
and talked with him for half an hour."

"You discharged him for inefficiency?"

"For immoral living, if you please."

Dr. Kennedy laughed with a grating sound. "Who the devil gave it to
you to be judge and jury? Does landlordism give you control of the
immortal souls of those that toil for you? I have been your
physician. Am I to expect tomorrow your ukase that I give up Scotch
and soda or your patronage? Bah! Ford, you take life too
seriously. Besides, when Joe got into that smuggling scrape (he
wasn't in your employ, either), and he sent word to you, asked you
to pay his fine, you left him to do his six months' hard labour on
the reef. Don't forget, you left Joe Garland in the lurch that
time. You threw him down, hard; and yet I remember the first day
you came to school--we boarded, you were only a day scholar--you had
to be initiated. Three times under in the swimming tank--you
remember, it was the regular dose every new boy got. And you held
back. You denied that you could swim. You were frightened,
hysterical--"

"Yes, I know," Percival Ford said slowly. "I was frightened. And
it was a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened."

"And you remember who fought for you? who lied for you harder than
you could lie, and swore he knew you couldn't swim? Who jumped into
the tank and pulled you out after the first under and was nearly
drowned for it by the other boys, who had discovered by that time
that you COULD swim?"

"Of course I know," the other rejoined coldly. "But a generous act
as a boy does not excuse a lifetime of wrong living."

"He has never done wrong to you?--personally and directly, I mean?"

"No," was Percival Ford's answer. "That is what makes my position
impregnable. I have no personal spite against him. He is bad, that
is all. His life is bad--"

"Which is another way of saying that he does not agree with you in
the way life should be lived," the doctor interrupted.

"Have it that way. It is immaterial. He is an idler--"

"With reason," was the interruption, "considering the jobs out of
which you have knocked him."

"He is immoral--"

"Oh, hold on now, Ford. Don't go harping on that. You are pure New
England stock. Joe Garland is half Kanaka. Your blood is thin.
His is warm. Life is one thing to you, another thing to him. He
laughs and sings and dances through life, genial, unselfish,
childlike, everybody's friend. You go through life like a
perambulating prayer-wheel, a friend of nobody but the righteous,
and the righteous are those who agree with you as to what is right.
And after all, who shall say? You live like an anchorite. Joe
Garland lives like a good fellow. Who has extracted the most from
life? We are paid to live, you know. When the wages are too meagre
we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all rational
suicide. Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get
from life. You see, he is made differently. So would you starve on
his wages, which are singing, and love--"

"Lust, if you will pardon me," was the interruption.

Dr. Kennedy smiled.

"Love, to you, is a word of four letters and a definition which you
have extracted from the dictionary. But love, real love, dewy and
palpitant and tender, you do not know. If God made you and me, and
men and women, believe me He made love, too. But to come back.
It's about time you quit hounding Joe Garland. It is not worthy of
you, and it is cowardly. The thing for you to do is to reach out
and lend him a hand."

"Why I, any more than you?" the other demanded. "Why don't you
reach him a hand?"

"I have. I'm reaching him a hand now. I'm trying to get you not to
down the Promotion Committee's proposition of sending him away. I
got him the job at Hilo with Mason and Fitch. I've got him half a
dozen jobs, out of every one of which you drove him. But never mind
that. Don't forget one thing--and a little frankness won't hurt
you--it is not fair play to saddle another fault on Joe Garland; and
you know that you, least of all, are the man to do it. Why, man,
it's not good taste. It's positively indecent."

"Now I don't follow you," Percival Ford answered. "You're up in the
air with some obscure scientific theory of heredity and personal
irresponsibility. But how any theory can hold Joe Garland
irresponsible for his wrongdoings and at the same time hold me
personally responsible for them--more responsible than any one else,
including Joe Garland--is beyond me."

"It's a matter of delicacy, I suppose, or of taste, that prevents
you from following me," Dr. Kennedy snapped out. "It's all very
well, for the sake of society, tacitly to ignore some things, but
you do more than tacitly ignore."

"What is it, pray, that I tacitly ignore!"

Dr. Kennedy was angry. A deeper red than that of constitutional
Scotch and soda suffused his face, as he answered:

"Your father's son."

"Now just what do you mean?"

"Damn it, man, you can't ask me to be plainer spoken than that. But
if you will, all right--Isaac Ford's son--Joe Garland--your
brother."

Percival Ford sat quietly, an annoyed and shocked expression on his
face. Kennedy looked at him curiously, then, as the slow minutes
dragged by, became embarrassed and frightened.

"Everybody knows it," he said. "I thought you knew it. And since
you don't know it, it's time you did, and I'm glad of the chance of
setting you straight. Joe Garland and you are brothers--half-
brothers."

"It's a lie," Ford cried. "You don't mean it. Joe Garland's mother
was Eliza Kunilio." (Dr. Kennedy nodded.) "I remember her well,
with her duck pond and taro patch. His father was Joseph Garland,
the beach-comber." (Dr. Kennedy shook his head.) "He died only two
or three years ago. He used to get drunk. There's where Joe got
his dissoluteness. There's the heredity for you."

"And nobody told you," Kennedy said wonderingly, after a pause.

"Dr. Kennedy, you have said something terrible, which I cannot allow
to pass. You must either prove or, or . . . "

"Prove it yourself. Turn around and look at him. You've got him in
profile. Look at his nose. That's Isaac Ford's. Yours is a thin
edition of it. That's right. Look. The lines are fuller, but they
are all there."

Percival Ford looked at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the
hau tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing
on a wraith of himself. Feature after feature flashed up an
unmistakable resemblance. Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith
of that other full-muscled and generously moulded man. And his
features, and that other man's features, were all reminiscent of
Isaac Ford. And nobody had told him. Every line of Isaac Ford's
face he knew. Miniatures, portraits, and photographs of his father
were passing in review through his mind, and here and there, over
and again, in the face before him, he caught resemblances and vague
hints of likeness. It was devil's work that could reproduce the
austere features of Isaac Ford in the loose and sensuous features
before him. Once, the man turned, and for one flashing instant it
seemed to Percival Ford that he saw his father, dead and gone,
peering at him out of the face of Joe Garland.

"It's nothing at all," he could faintly hear Dr. Kennedy saying,
"They were all mixed up in the old days. You know that. You've
seen it all your life. Sailors married queens and begat princesses
and all the rest of it. It was the usual thing in the Islands."

"But not with my father," Percival Ford interrupted.

"There> you are." Kennedy shrugged his shoulders. "Cosmic sap and
smoke of life. Old Isaac Ford was straitlaced and all the rest, and
I know there's no explaining it, least of all to himself. He
understood it no more than you do. Smoke of life, that's all. And
don't forget one thing, Ford. There was a dab of unruly blood in
old Isaac Ford, and Joe Garland inherited it--all of it, smoke of
life and cosmic sap; while you inherited all of old Isaac's ascetic
blood. And just because your blood is cold, well-ordered, and well-
disciplined, is no reason that you should frown upon Joe Garland.
When Joe Garland undoes the work you do, remember that it is only
old Isaac Ford on both sides, undoing with one hand what he does
with the other. You are Isaac Ford's right hand, let us say; Joe
Garland is his left hand."

Percival Ford made no answer, and in the silence Dr. Kennedy
finished his forgotten Scotch and soda. From across the grounds an
automobile hooted imperatively.

"There's the machine," Dr. Kennedy said, rising. "I've got to run.
I'm sorry I've shaken you up, and at the same time I'm glad. And
know one thing, Isaac Ford's dab of unruly blood was remarkably
small, and Joe Garland got it all. And one other thing. If your
father's left hand offend you, don't smite it off. Besides, Joe is
all right. Frankly, if I could choose between you and him to live
with me on a desert isle, I'd choose Joe."

Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass;
but Percival Ford did not see them. He was gazing steadily at the
singer under the hau tree. He even changed his position once, to
get closer. The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and
dragging his reluctant feet. He had lived forty years on the
Islands. Percival Ford beckoned to him, and the clerk came
respectfully, and wondering that he should be noticed by Percival
Ford.

Photographs and miniatures of Isaac Ford were trooping through his
son's brain, and ghosts of Isaac Ford seemed in the air about hint
"I wish you good night, sir," he could hear the clerk saying, and he
saw him beginning to limp away.

"John," he called abruptly.

John came back and stood near him, blinking and nervously moistening
his lips.

"You haven't told me yet, you know."

"Oh, about Joe Garland?"

"Yes, about Joe Garland. Who is he?"

"He's your brother, sir, if I say it who shouldn't."

"And you didn't know?" the old man queried, content to linger, now
that the crucial point was past.

Out of the clear sky, filled only with stars and moonlight, fell a
rain so fine and attenuated as to resemble a vapour spray. Nobody
minded it; the children played on, running bare-legged over the
grass and leaping into the sand; and in a few minutes it was gone.
In the south-east, Diamond Head, a black blot, sharply defined,
silhouetted its crater-form against the stars. At sleepy intervals
the surf flung its foam across the sands to the grass, and far out
could be seen the black specks of swimmers under the moon. The
voices of the singers, singing a waltz, died away; and in the
silence, from somewhere under the trees, arose the laugh of a woman
that was a love-cry. It startled Percival Ford, and it reminded him
of Dr. Kennedy's phrase. Down by the outrigger canoes, where they
lay hauled out on the sand, he saw men and women, Kanakas, reclining
languorously, like lotus-eaters, the women in white holokus; and
against one such holoku he saw the dark head of the steersman of the
canoe resting upon the woman's shoulder. Farther down, where the
strip of sand widened at the entrance to the lagoon, he saw a man
and woman walking side by side. As they drew near the light lanai,
he saw the woman's hand go down to her waist and disengage a
girdling arm. And as they passed him, Percival Ford nodded to a
captain he knew, and to a major's daughter. Smoke of life, that was
it, an ample phrase. And again, from under the dark algaroba tree
arose the laugh of a woman that was a love-cry; and past his chair,
on the way to bed, a bare-legged youngster was led by a chiding
Japanese nurse-maid. The voices of the singers broke softly and
meltingly into an Hawaiian love-song, and officers and women, with
encircling arms, were gliding and whirling on the lanai; and once
again the woman laughed under the algaroba trees.

And Percival Ford knew only disapproval of it all. He was irritated
by the love-laugh of the woman, by the steersman with pillowed head
on the white holoku, by the couples that walked on the beach, by the
officers and women that danced, and by the voices of the singers
singing of love, and his brother singing there with them under the
hau tree. The woman that laughed especially irritated him. A
curious train of thought was aroused. He was Isaac Ford's son, and
what had happened with Isaac Ford might happen with him. He felt in
his cheeks the faint heat of a blush at the thought, and experienced
a poignant sense of shame. He was appalled by what was in his
blood. It was like learning suddenly that his father had been a
leper and that his own blood might bear the taint of that dread
disease. Isaac Ford, the austere soldier of the Lord--the old
hypocrite! What difference between him and any beach-comber? The
house of pride that Percival Ford had builded was tumbling about his
ears.

The hours passed, the army people laughed and danced, the native
orchestra played on, and Percival Ford wrestled with the abrupt and
overwhelming problem that had been thrust upon him. He prayed
quietly, his elbow on the table, his head bowed upon his hand, with
all the appearance of any tired onlooker. Between the dances the
army men and women and the civilians fluttered up to him and buzzed
conventionally, and when they went back to the lanai he took up his
wrestling where he had left it off.

He began to patch together his shattered ideal of Isaac Ford, and
for cement he used a cunning and subtle logic. It was of the sort
that is compounded in the brain laboratories of egotists, and it
worked. It was incontrovertible that his father had been made of
finer clay than those about him; but still, old Isaac had been only
in the process of becoming, while he, Percival Ford, had become. As
proof of it, he rehabilitated his father and at the same time
exalted himself. His lean little ego waxed to colossal proportions.
He was great enough to forgive. He glowed at the thought of it.
Isaac Ford had been great, but he was greater, for he could forgive
Isaac Ford and even restore him to the holy place in his memory,
though the place was not quite so holy as it had been. Also, he
applauded Isaac Ford for having ignored the outcome of his one step
aside. Very well, he, too, would ignore it.

The dance was breaking up. The orchestra had finished "Aloha Oe"
and was preparing to go home. Percival Ford clapped his hands for
the Japanese servant.

"You tell that man I want to see him," he said, pointing out Joe
Garland. "Tell him to come here, now."

Joe Garland approached and halted respectfully several paces away,
nervously fingering the guitar which he still carried. The other
did not ask him to sit down.

"You are my brother," he said.

"Why, everybody knows that," was the reply, in tones of wonderment.

"Yes, so I understand," Percival Ford said dryly. "But I did not
know it till this evening."

The half-brother waited uncomfortably in the silence that followed,
during which Percival Ford coolly considered his next utterance.

"You remember that first time I came to school and the boys ducked
me?" he asked. "Why did you take my part?"

The half-brother smiled bashfully.

"Because you knew?"

"Yes, that was why."

"But I didn't know," Percival Ford said in the same dry fashion.

"Yes," the other said.

Anothe silence fell. Servants were beginning to put out the lights
on the lanai.

"You know . . . now," the half-brother said simply.

Percival Ford frowned. Then he looked the other over with a
considering eye.

"How much will you take to leave the Islands and never come back?"
he demanded.

"And never come back?" Joe Garland faltered. "It is the only land I
know. Other lands are cold. I do not know other lands. I have
many friends here. In other lands there would not be one voice to
say, 'Aloha, Joe, my boy.'"

"I said never to come back," Percival Ford reiterated. "The Alameda
sails tomorrow for San Francisco."

Joe Garland was bewildered.

"But why?" he asked. "You know now that we are brothers."

"That is why," was the retort. "As you said yourself, everybody
knows. I will make it worth your while."

All awkwardness and embarrassment disappeared from Joe Garland.
Birth and station were bridged and reversed.

"You want me to go?" he demanded.

"I want you to go and never come back," Percival Ford answered.

And in that moment, flashing and fleeting, it was given him to see
his brother tower above him like a mountain, and to feel himself
dwindle and dwarf to microscopic insignificance. But it is not well
for one to see himself truly, nor can one so see himself for long
and live; and only for that flashing moment did Percival Ford see
himself and his brother in true perspective. The next moment he was
mastered by his meagre and insatiable ego.

"As I said, I will make it worth your while. You will not suffer.
I will pay you well."

"All right," Joe Garland said. "I'll go."

He started to turn away.

"Joe," the other called. "You see my lawyer tomorrow morning. Five
hundred down and two hundred a month as long as you stay away."

"You are very kind," Joe Garland answered softly. "You are too
kind. And anyway, I guess I don't want your money. I go tomorrow
on the Alameda."